by the state. In Michoacán, the cultural missionaries represented a moral threat to the power of the church, whose authority had been confined and narrowed by the rise of the Sonoran Dynasty. Given such dramatic differences, the relationship of the cultural mission to the local community in Mexico was descriptive rather than normative, a matter of local experience and negotiation rather than distant control and top-down absolutes.
Under such differential conditions, the Americans witnessed missionary programs in Mexico that worked with the support of the local community when the federal state deliberately avoided places that were physically hostile to the presence of Mexico’s shock troops. This success explains the enthusiasm the Americans noted in the communities where the cultural mission was present, for there the community had been vetted and approved. The cultural missions became, in other words, a malleable instrument for rethinking the administrative power of the school and government’s relationship to rural communities in the United States. Tireman found residents eager to use the outreach power of the state government to improve the soil of their rural New Mexico communities. Likewise, rural residents in New Mexico were eager to use the school to learn English for their children, a task considered necessary to participate in the changing economy. In 1940s California, meanwhile, the cultural mission became the mechanism for assimilating immigrant children to a national culture of the United States that was being reformulated in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II.
Actopan, or the Rural Normal School
Sixty miles northeast of Mexico City, as one moves out of the historical core where the SEP established its headquarters in 1921, Mexico’s highway system collapses from a pattern of north-south tributaries radiating out of the capital into an east-west federal interstate that veers sharply around the southern periphery of the Las Cruces Mountains. Follow the interstate east to the city of Puebla, eighty miles away; follow it west, and Querétaro can be reached one hundred miles away. But directly to the north, the Las Cruces Mountains remain largely impenetrable even today, effectively helping frame the northern tier of mountain ranges that give Mexico City its shape as a bowl.
It is on the flat plain that drops out of the northern side of the Las Cruces Mountains that the postrevolutionary Mexican state located the educational institution that received more commentary by the Americans than any other. Here, in the geographic center of the homeland where the indigenous Otomí people have lived for more than one thousand years, the SEP established the teacher training academy, or escuela normal rural, known as Actopan, in a converted Catholic monastery the Mexican government had stripped away from the Catholic Church. Rural normal schools as physically close to Mexico City as Actopan had also been located in the states of Tlaxcala, Puebla, and Morelos, part of a system of normal academies that had been established throughout the republic.6 But the density of indigenous communities so close to Mexico City made the state of Hidalgo a prime target for Mexico’s educational integration work. It was the site of the oldest misión cultural, for example, and SEP officials frequently steered American visitors who came to Mexico in the 1930s toward Actopan. It was here that child psychologist Loyd Tireman visited in 1931 and wrote of several months later. Educator George Sánchez visited here and showcased Actopan in his 1936 book on Mexico’s schools. Social worker and teacher Catherine Vesta Sturges worked at Actopan for four years beginning in 1928 before becoming a protégé of John Collier at the BIA during the New Deal.
This premier showcase of the Mexican government won accolades from the Americans for its attempts to systematize the training of the schoolteachers to whom the Mexican state had given primary responsibility for ensuring the success of the postrevolutionary integration project. If the misiones culturales launched the postrevolutionary project out of Mexico City in the early years when local communities did not yet have federal schools, it was the role of the escuela normal rural to indoctrinate the cadre of schoolteachers into the state’s melting pot project after those rural schools had been established. Much like a normal school in the United States, the federal normal school was a teacher training college for young adults, and it received lavish resources from Mexico City. In the early years of the SEP, the escuela normal rural was absent from the educational landscape. But as the number of elementary schools grew in the years after 1921, it became the hub of teacher training. It took on the responsibility of training the teachers who went to work in the new public schools, and it provided the primary institutional footprint out of which radiated the cultural missions on the training sojourns to the rural communities of the nation. Teachers migrated from their home villages to the normal school for extended seasons of classroom instruction, after which they were certified to teach in the rural schools of the various provinces. Once they returned home to their villages, they were visited by the instructors of the cultural missions, whose duty was to reinforce the original instruction that the teachers had received from the state.
Since normal schools like Actopan were expected to operate indefinitely in remote areas of the nation, they depended almost entirely on federal outlays from the SEP budget. Education professors were assigned to the normal school, where they often remained in place for three years or more. Pupils at the normal school were adolescents and young adults, many with only rudimentary reading and writing skills, yet they were much older than the four- to ten-year-olds who attended the federal rural schools, and they were expected, as a result, to maintain much higher degrees of discipline and attention to their studies as representatives of the new state. The escuela anexa (annex school) was attached to each federal normal school and served as the laboratory school for these young teachers. The normal school and annex school are sometimes mistaken for one another, but they were distinct institutions. Much as a laboratory school served as a teacher training elementary school in schools of education in the United States, the escuela anexa was the laboratory school where normal students trained to be classroom instructors under the supervision of the normal school professors. It was in the escuela anexa where theory hit the road. Ideas in learning were transformed into the practice of learning, in preparation for the ultimate test of the new nation: instruction and social reconstruction from within the federal rural school where the new teachers would find themselves in trial-by-fire situations within a few months. If things went well, the teachers would find a happy medium with the community to which they had gone. If things went poorly, they would be killed and their bodies dumped on the outskirts of the village.7
For the Americans, the most important characteristic of the rural normal schools was the system of supervision through which the Mexican federal state attempted to indoctrinate its normal school students into the regimen prescribed by the Secretariat of Public Education. The rural normal school of Oaxtepec, Morelos, was typical. Along with Anenecuilco, both Oaxtepec and Cuautla—the first city to fall to Zapata during the Mexican Revolution—lie on the same flat plain in Morelos fifty miles south of Mexico City, bounded by mountains on all sides. When inspector Higinio Vázquez Santa Ana was tasked with preparing an inspection report for the SEP headquarters in 1933, he left a description of Oaxtepec’s training policies. Vázquez left out the exact number of students enrolled at the school, but they had come from the states of Guerrero, Puebla, and Mexico, and from Mexico City. He reported that 50 percent were men and 50 percent women. Students had to be sixteen or older to enroll, and they were subsequently arranged in classes of instruction that corresponded to the first-, third-, and fifth-grade classrooms to which they would be assigned on graduation. Some students were deficient in primary skills, including reading and writing, and required an additional year of primary school instruction before they could return to their studies at Oaxtepec. Of those found to need an extra year, two-thirds were members of Mexico’s Native American communities.8
Figures 6 and 7. Two photographs of the normal rural school at Erongícuaro, Michoacán. At bottom, a teacher in training guides his students at Erongarícuaro’s annex school. Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de Educación Pública (AHSEP), Mexico City, Mexico, Sección Dirección
